John Carpenter Says a New ‘They Live’ ‘Might Be Closer to Reality Than You Think’

With a new Halloween opening in theaters this Friday — one featuring a new version of the original film’s classic score by its director/composer, John Carpenter — our minds turn once again to other Carpenter films that might be ripe for updating/remaking/sequelizing. They already did a remake of The Fog and, well, it sucked. But there are a lot of others classics in that catalogue. Maybe Big Trouble in Little China? Wait, on second thought, Carpenter hates that idea. How about Assault on Precinct 13? Oh, they did that one already too. Huh.

Perhaps the timeliest Carpenter film is one of the few they haven’t strip-mined for parts yet: They Live, Carpenter’s searing satire of ’80s culture and television’s mind-numbing effects on the human psyche. A relative flop in its day, They Live has slowly grown into one of the most acclaimed and beloved science-fiction films of the 1980s. If anything, its message is even more prophetic and ominous now in a world of smartphones and social media.

In a recent interview with Den Of Geek, Carpenter revealed that you could see a new They Live — and that “it might be closer to reality than you think.” Asked how he would refashion the material for 2018, he refused to answer, because we might actually see the answer soon on the big screen. He also discussed a remake that was in development at some point:

There was a feature film. It was a feature film called Resistance, written by, oh, the guy who did the Apes movies. Matt Reeves. But then he moved on, and so the sequel is, well, we'll see. We'll just have to see.

If I get a vote: Do a They Live TV series. What better setting to eviscerate the medium than the medium itself? 10 episodes on Hulu would give us enough time to really explore the premise of this world that has been secretly overrun by aliens. Then one entire episode can just be a recreation of the famous fight between Roddy Piper and Keith David.